Category: Personal

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December 2023 update

I stopped posting updates to this blog almost one year ago. At the time, I was deeply involved in producing yet another academic paper (It’s out!) and we had just had our second child.

I still like the process of writing my ideas and sharing them with others. But the process has become too time consuming. And, sadly, the payoff in a noisy world is pretty thin.

Having some experience of the whole key-opinion-leader (KOL) process I don’t think that I’m ever going to be very successful on that path.

Decisions

Three key decisions are relevant for the current post

  1. Commission somebody to redesign this site. I need to make it more navigable, so that you the reader can access the more relevant posts on your first visit.
  2. Post considerably less frequently. Yes I will begin to write again, but the articles will only be posted after the redesign.
  3. Display a thread of some of my most relevant articles as a first contact point for the interim. (Coming next week).

About me

I am still a life-sciences and technology founder. I still prefer the technical rather than business role, although I frequently do both albeit rarely at the same time. I came very close to founding a Software-as-a-InVitro-Diagnostic (SaIVD) company in 2023, unfortunately our hopes did not come to fruition. I earn my income from advising others on Team, Architecture and Build. Mostly I get paid to solve serious problems. I also do due diligence for investors.

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Mental Health Check

I guess that I am not the only one who has found the grind of a second pandemic lockdown a drain also on mental health and productivity.

The first lockdown was almost fun. For the first time in years I was able to sit at home, work on what I wanted to work on, and go jogging regularly in clean air. There was even the bonus of a new wave of healthcare related information across every media outlet – a field with which I have been passionately involved for 20 years now.

This time is a bit different. First of all it is Winter, so jogging in the park is not so easy. It’s snowing and -10 celsius (-20 fahrenheit) today. Air pollution has not dropped this time, I guess it’s a combination of lignite burning and car emissions. And work is much more stressful this time around. That last point is what I want to write about today.

Continue reading “Mental Health Check”
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2020 coming to an end

The past two end-of-years I have wanted to write a bilan de l’année. Both years were incredibly exciting and I had a lot to look back on. In both cases I wrote the notes for myself but never published them on the site. I guess that, while it is both useful and healthy to keep a monitor of how things have gone, I am not so keen on going public on these topics.

2020 has been a particularly unusual year. I am not excited about what I did this year. But I have to admit that this year, despite the obvious difficulties, brought a welcome return to modes of work which agree with me and, frankly, a blistering level of productivity.

Continue reading “2020 coming to an end”
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Managing People

I really love dealing with people. I come from a culture which highly prizes human interaction and communication skills. But I also love technical work, and this tends to attract people who prefer to work alone. In this article I want to discuss my progression through different styles of management and leadership throughout my life.

Continue reading “Managing People”
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Modelling the Modeller

Something I’ve struggled with on and off over the 20 years that I have been making mathematical models is explaining those models to others. I have tried to bring people along and develop their understanding. But mainly what I observed was that, some people just got it and others did not.

I have certainly improved my own skill at explaining. This comes down to having streamlined stories and simpler take-home messages. Telling a clearer story certainly improves my audiences’ self-satisfaction, but ultimately some of them get the whole message and others do not.

Continue reading “Modelling the Modeller”
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The era of the solo contributor is dead

I have been reconnecting with some of my academic friends. We all belong more or less to the same age cohort. In recent weeks, I have been watching them interacting with one another on Twitter and through various other media. They each have achieved considerable degrees of success in their chosen fields – all have tenure at global top-50 ranked institutions. Through my observations, I have come to the realisation that the era of the solo contributor is dead.

Continue reading “The era of the solo contributor is dead”
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Why I write

I sometimes see myself as a slow learner. I am extremely fast at deep-thinking, which somewhat disguises this fact, but I learn things from the ground up. Until I can think a topic through I sometimes feel unsure about operating from an incomplete understanding.

When I worked in academia I prefered to learn rather than to force my opinions on others. Everybody seemed reasonably smart, and they were absolutely convinced of their own correctness, and so I listened and learned. Continue reading “Why I write”

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The network you grow up with

A sense of home is a powerful feeling. The sense of belonging, of knowing where everything is. I miss that sometimes.

I left Ireland almost exactly 10 years ago with a burning need to go out and prove myself. I had finally recovered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and was going to take up a much delayed PhD position. I moved to the University of Luebeck, where I found my introduction to neuroscience, before moving on to Paris Descartes, the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Chicago. With each move I developed a new network of colleagues, collaborators, and mentors.

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by a member of the Irish mathematical community. Many years ago I wrote the website for the Mathematics Department at NUI, Galway. While doing that I included biographies of the then members of staff and their research domains. At some point, I also made a backup of the website for my own reference under my personal domain. Sadly, many of the members of staff who worked at NUI, Galway when I was an undergraduate are now dead. So now this resource has become a useful archive. And thus I was re-discovered by a member of the current Irish mathematical community.

Continue reading “The network you grow up with”